


Bloom

by anano



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Billy Hargrove Lives, Captivity, M/M, Steve Harrington Has Powers, Whump, Whumptober 2019
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2020-11-22 06:03:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 8,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20869379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anano/pseuds/anano
Summary: Nobody shot him, but Christ, they came close. He could just tell. Looking at one of the men in a suit and tie with hands shaking around a handgun, Steve could tell the guy was afraidof him.(aka Steve gets powers and is trapped in the government lab with Billy, aka Whumptober 2019)





	1. gunpoint

Something crazy happened after the gate closed. Steve’s whole body, like, filled with fire and his mind blanked out and everybody around him dropped dead. Or, no — some of them were shaking, the military guys and Feds with their guns clattering to the ground. Even Robin dropped next to him. 

“Hey, Robin?” His voice was wrecked. But she was moving on the ground, rolling over and groaning. _Thank God thank God thank God_. He couldn’t see any of the kids from there. He licked his lips automatically, tasted blood running into his mouth.

Then there was shouting. More people ran in and trained their guns on him while he stood there dumbly, bringing a hand up to his nose and drawing it away when blood dripped down his fingers. Panic crushed him. He was dying. His _brain_ was melting. He was about to be shot. He could barely understand the shit they were yelling. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he breathed, totally inaudible to everyone around him.

Nobody shot him, but Christ, they came close. He could just tell. Looking at one of the men in a suit and tie with hands shaking around a handgun, Steve could tell the guy was afraid _of him_. 

The ones on the ground were coming around like Robin had. Whatever happened didn’t hit him the way it hit them.

Three men in tactical gear approached him. His hands raised up on their own accord; it certainly wasn’t the first time in twenty four hours he’d stared down the barrel. A trail of blood was running down his wrist — all that from his nose. 

One of them rounded on him, restrained him, started to lead him away.

“Hey, wait— is she okay?” He twisted around to try and see Robin on the ground but they were blocking his view, and he ended up stumbling along with them. They were going _deeper_ into the mall. He recognized some of the back halls, and then he didn’t recognize them at all, and then finally they emerged out of a back door and into the humid summer night.

They didn’t stop. He got shoved into the back of a van before he could say a word.

There were two more men with guns and tactical masks, and Billy on the floor. Steve nearly tripped over him.

“Oh, shit. Is he dead?”

They didn’t answer, only pushed him down onto the bench seat and sat opposite him with their guns still raised. 

His feet were right up against Billy’s side. There was blood or, like, some kind of black goop under his sneakers, and Billy really didn’t _look_ like he was alive — he looked unnaturally pale, covered in gore, completely unmoving. The van took off and jostled them, so Steve couldn’t tell if he was breathing at all. “Hey,” he said, voice raised desperately high, “is anyone gonna help him?”

Not a peep.

“He’s still alive.” His eyes were trained on Billy’s face. He looked really, really dead, but Steve _knew_ he wasn’t. And since nobody else was moving, he slid off the seat and pressed his hands to the big wound on Billy’s chest, like that might actually help. He wasn’t cold yet, at least. One of the guys stood up in alarm at his movement, and when Steve looked up he could kind of see his eyes through his helmet and saw _fear_ again for some reason. “Can you _fucking help me_?” he ended up screaming, and the other guy actually dropped his gun on the floor and did.


	2. delirium

They injected him with something and he slipped underwater, but not all the way. He was aware of a bed. White walls. A heavy metal door. The blinking red eye up in the corner. He was in a fish tank, everything muffled behind smudged glass.

Then he was aware of Billy, who wasn’t there but who was still alive. Steve could feel him not too far away. He could sense a lot of other people around him too, but he only recognized Billy, so he tried to hold onto him. 

They moved him in his sleep (or while he was awake, he couldn’t tell anymore) and put him in a machine, attached wires to his head, stuck things in his veins. He saw needles dashing lines on paper and that indicated his brain, somehow, and looked to him like he was going insane. There was always a hand holding him in place.

The whole time he felt this gouging fear, louder in some places than others, but he was too slow to panic and could only get some slurred noises out of his mouth. It didn’t make a difference. Billy was in here somewhere. Steve couldn’t do anything for him. He couldn’t do anything for Steve.

He saw the big monster they’d supposedly killed. He saw the Upside-Down again and again, a much worse version of this same building. Everything was rotted, abandoned, and cold — there was no way out. He felt phantom pains all over his body.

It was only when he finally _really_ woke up that he realized they were nightmares. He was in different clothes: soft baggy pants without a drawstring and a plain t-shirt. No shoes. He couldn’t remember if he changed into them himself or if someone had stripped him out of his stupid work uniform in his sleep. It was kind of the least of his concerns.

His mouth was dry as a desert and his head felt overly sensitive. He touched under his nose to check for blood. His face might have been beat up and raw, but it was clean now. 

“Hello?” he said into the empty room.

Out of nowhere, that fear bowled him over again. For a second he thought he was still dreaming, what with the chill that broke over him and dirt smudging the walls and the darkness in every corner — he blinked and the room was bright and clean again. The only disruption was the sudden sharp intake of his own breath. He sat shaking on the bed, frozen in anticipation of it repeating.

The strangest thing was, he could sense someone coming before there was any sign of another person in the hallway. It was sorta like hearing something distantly, but not actually _hearing_. Maybe he was still high from the stuff they injected him with. If he hadn’t caught snatches of English while he was under, he would have guessed he was back with the Russians.

The door opened with a loud _clunk_ and two people walked in. 

“Steve Harrington,” the guy in the gray suit and tie said without introduction, clipboard in hand. There was a man to his right standing warily, gun prominent at his hip. “We hope you’ll answer some questions. Such as, how long have you had these abilities?” He looked poised, ready to write, not even looking up at him.

“Uh,” Steve said. “What?”

“Were the Russians aware of these abilities and were you ever given orders by any level of authority within the Soviet—”

“_No._ What?” He was aware he sounded a little hysterical. “Where am I? I mean, where is this?”

He felt a growing annoyance that didn’t match up with how nervous he was. It wasn’t coming from him. Before he could work out how _his own feeling_ wasn’t coming from him, clipboard guy said, boredly, “You’re being held by the federal government until we can determine the kind of threat you pose.”

“I’m not a _threat_. I don’t even know what’s going on,” he insisted. “Is my— my friend I came in with, Billy Hargrove, is he okay?” 

Clipboard guy paused and his eyes narrowed. “What do you know about him?”

Steve blinked. There wasn’t much he knew about Billy now that he didn’t know a year ago, except that the dude was lifeguarding at the Hawkins pool and got gutted by the Mind Flayer. They’d gone to school together. They beat the crap out of each other (if he’s being generous to himself). He hated Billy for a while, and then Billy just faded out of his life. 

He had Billy’s blood all over his hands— what, hours or days ago? There were no windows and no clocks here. And now he knew that Billy was in a room like this one, could feel in the way that you just knew things in dreams that Billy was alive, that part of him was in the Upside Down and part of him was here. He _kept seeing_ the Upside Down part. So maybe that’s how Steve could get to him.

He didn’t realize he’d been standing there like an idiot until clipboard guy sighed. “Okay, then. We’ll be back when you feel like talking.”

They both turned back toward the door.

“Come on, wait, I’m—” Steve scrambled off the bed, but a wave of dizziness jolted him. It was just a split second. He stumbled to the floor and he was aware of the two men falling forward, too. One of them caught himself against the door, and the clipboard guy dropped everything to clutch at his head. 

They didn’t go all the way to the floor this time. The guy who hadn’t said anything, the one with the gun at his hip, didn’t even draw his weapon, but pawed sightlessly at the door handle until he got it open. His fear hit Steve like a wall, crisp and clear. That’s what it was: _someone else’s_ fear. He could differentiate it from clipboard guy, whose confusion cleared quicker, who turned, panting, and stared daggers at him before he backed out the door and shut it. They ran down the hall, their feelings fading with the sound of their shoes hitting linoleum.

Steve sniffed and it was wet. His nose was bleeding again, just a trickle this time. And then the image of Eleven doing crazy stuff with her mind and bleeding in the same way almost knocked him over again because, _duh, holy fuck,_ it was _him_. He had superpowers.


	3. isolation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for letting this hang during the actual month of October, but I'm doing Nanowrimo so I'm back!

Steve didn’t know how long it took him to lose it — trying to count out a minute got old fast, and he had a feeling his approximation of an hour was way off.

He stared at the white walls and gray linoleum floor for so long that the line where they met got seared into his brain. He had a bed — rough sheets and a navy blue blanket — and a table with a chair. There was not so much a bathroom as a toilet and sink behind another section of the wall.

Whatever they wanted from him, they left him alone now. The only disruption was when they came in to give him a meal.

That was the only time he saw a person, too. And that person must have been instructed not to interact with him beyond delivering his food. It was usually someone different. Even if he tried to talk to them they never did more than glance his way.

He started to go nuts in — if they were feeding him twice a day — about three days.

He should have been planning his escape, or something, but he just missed everyone from outside like crazy; even his _dad_, who he couldn’t remember actually missing in like… ever. He kept the lights off a lot of the time because before his eyes adjusted — if he ignored the conditioned smell of the room and the unnatural silence, if he let himself fall into a state between awake and asleep — he could pretend it was his bedroom. That it was just a regular Tuesday night, or whatever, and he was bummed to have work the next day, but at least it was something to do.

Then he’d open his eyes and the red light would blink in the corner.

Sometimes his dreams about the Russian base or Dustin and Erica getting lost over and over would morph like a bad movie transition. They became scenes with unfamiliar people and places that he felt unfamiliar things about.

And, of course, Billy’s nightmares. Those dropped him into horrific scenes of people dying and people melting and Billy himself, Steve himself, holding them down, dragging their bodies, feeding the monster. Steve felt like they were real but he couldn’t see how that could be true.

The light flicked on while he was lying in bed. They could control it from outside, but they only did when someone entered, so Steve sat up. A woman he didn’t recognize came in with his food, looking away like the room was empty.

He watched her set his tray on the table and then yelled, “Hey!”

She jumped, and he felt her shock of fear and then wariness coming off of her in waves. He hadn’t expected her to even respond. It made him feel bad, because she was just some lady — she looked like someone he could have caught eyes with by chance on Main Street. Maybe there she would have smiled politely before she kept walking. Here, she backed toward the door without raising her eyes.

“Hey,” he said, deliberately softer. He cleared his throat. “Sorry. I’m Steve.”

She paused, still staring at the floor.

“But you know that, right? Can you at least tell me— um, how long I’ve been in here?” he asked, kind of desperate. It was not what he wanted to know the most, but it was something she might actually answer. And he knew when he had her. He felt the change.

She clenched her jaw and glanced up at him.

A chill went through him just from being looked at. In the two seconds her eyes searched his face he felt like a human being instead of a ghost. Her mouth opened like she was really going to answer him before she glanced up at the camera in the corner and obviously thought better of it.

She ducked her head again and opened the door behind her. Once she slipped out, it shut with a bang that bounced off the walls.


	4. bound

When Steve finally got to see him, Billy was strapped to the railing on a bed. Half of his body looked bandaged. He was clearly drugged up and there were wires and IVs trailing from him, but he was awake. His eyes slid off Steve and he muttered, “What the fuck?” Everyone else in the room ignored him.

Steve was hooked up to a lie detector. He couldn’t tell what it was actually reading, because his heart was pounding already, but there were bands around his chest and fingers getting some kind of data from him. They had already asked him a few generic questions to watch the machine’s response, but Steve couldn’t stop watching Billy.

“When did you meet him?” clipboard guy, whose last name he learned to be Rines, asked him.

“Um, last year. October. He transferred.”

“Have you been in contact with him over the past week?”

“No.” Steve wasn’t lying, but he glanced at the machine. It didn’t seem to do anything different. Then he looked back at Billy, laid out on the bed, who kept gripping and releasing the straps with gauze-wrapped hands. 

“Can you hear his thoughts?”

“No.” Billy squinted at him but it was clear he wasn’t following the conversation, was still trying to work out what Steve was even doing there in the room. Maybe he forgot how he knew Steve entirely. There was something deeply comforting about seeing his face in this setting, despite everything. 

“Can you sense anything unusual from him?”

“I don’t know?” Was it a trick question? Yeah, he could sense people’s feelings or thoughts or whatever, he’d figured that out by now. They knew that too, and still they expected him to do more. But if he was getting anything from Billy, it was only confusion — and he felt enough of that on his own. “It’s hard to tell when, like, when there are a lot of people around.”

Rines looked at him keenly. He always seemed to think Steve was trying to play him, or something. But he only sighed and inclined his head to the others in the room. The technicians and the woman standing by Billy’s bed didn’t hesitate, just got up and left at his indication. 

“Okay, Steve,” he said, leveling him with a look across the table that was part challenging, part irritated. “Focus.”

_On what?_ Billy’s eyes were closed, but he wasn’t totally still, his whole body was wound tight in pain. Steve scrunched his eyebrows together, trying to _focus_. He strained to listen, even though these feelings he picked up on never came in through his ears — he hadn’t figured out how to concentrate with his powers yet. 

He felt — one of Billy’s arms shot up, trying to grab something or push it away in some half-awake nightmare before it was stopped by the strap around his wrist — Steve felt a spike of desperate fear that made him jerk in his seat. Billy was asleep like he was being held down and forced unconscious. He was fighting it.

Rines asked, “What is it?”

“I think it’s a nightmare. He’s afraid.” Steve heard a small sigh from him, and he finally tore his eyes from Billy to look this guy in the eye. “_What?_ What exactly do you want me to say?”

“I want some insight into what the hell is going on with you two,” Rines said almost entirely through his teeth. “Do you sense anything _from him_ that you don’t sense _from me_?” 

“I mean.” He thought of the bone-chilling dreams he saw from Billy, as close as he’d come to reading someone’s mind. “It’s just nightmares, I think.”

“You think.”

“Okay,” Steve said, resting his hands on the table in front of him so he didn’t freak out and tear the sensors off his fingers. He was _tired_. His stomach felt like the Grand fucking Canyon because, even though they were gracious enough to feed him, he was so goddamn anxious that his gut turned every time he tried to eat. He’d only gotten to shower once since coming here, and he was pretty sure there’d been a camera watching him then, too. Plus, his head had been hurting for _days_.

Just as he drew in a breath, Rines stood up in front of him. “Don’t worry. It could be that you need training, or it could be that you need the proper motivation. Whatever it is, we’ll find it.” And on that frankly disquieting notion, he started to gather up his notes. 

“Training? _Motivation_?” Steve could barely put into words how frustrated he was, and that was only pissing him off more. “I didn’t ask for this shit—”

“None of us asked for _this shit_,” Rines said matter-of-factly.

“So quit your fucking job.” 

It made the man really look at him. For a second Steve was afraid he was going to do something to him — because at the end of the day, he was a prisoner here, even if everyone around him pretended he wasn’t. As far as he knew, everybody on the outside world already thought he was dead. 

But he wasn’t sensing that kind of intention from Rines. He wasn’t able to pinpoint the man’s feelings before he turned, wordless. On his way out, he gestured for the others to get back in the room. 

The door shut. Steve went to stand up but immediately dragged wires with him, so he sat back down. It wasn’t like he’d get far doing anything here, anyway. If he wasn’t constantly watched on camera then someone would be there to monitor him within seconds. 

But he said Billy’s name, hoping he could at least get something sensible out of the guy even given the state he was in.

Billy groaned, though he’d been doing that intermittently the entire time. He didn’t look any more awake than he had a couple minutes ago. Steve realized that this must be his room. It was pretty much identical to his own down the hall, but with a lot more medical equipment. 

He thought to look up over his shoulder and, just like he thought — same camera in the same corner of the ceiling.

Then the technicians came back in and set to work unhooking him from the machine. Billy, though, they left strapped down.


	5. "wake up"

Three days later, they moved Steve in with Billy.

It was a new room, but more of the same: two beds with rough sheets, a bathroom hidden enough to give the _notion_ of privacy without the actual privacy, and the blinking red light watching from the corner. At least this one had a rug in the middle of the floor.

Billy was here already, sitting up in bed looking a hell of a lot more lucid than he did the other day. He was still bent half over with an arm resting around his middle, and his face was mostly a grimace, but Steve could feel his surprise and wariness the moment the door opened. He eyed them and the open hallway behind them without moving, probably still rooted to the spot by pain. He had basically been gutted, after all.

“There,” Rines said after walking him in, almost smug. Like Steve had been begging for a roommate and not his freedom. He shot him an indignant stare. 

Rines was just about the only person he was permitted to have a conversation with in this place, for some reason, and they hated each other’s guts. Well, the guy kept his feelings guarded whenever he was around Steve, but it couldn’t be more obvious. It was a back and forth strategy game between them where pieces never moved. At least not on Steve’s end.

As expected, Rines only ignored him and turned on his heel for the door. They’d come so infuriatingly far from those first days when everyone seemed _afraid_ of him. 

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Billy asked as soon as the door slammed shut.

“You don’t look too hot,” he said. Not the most pertinent thing to say, but goddamn, he could have kissed him. It was such a relief to talk to a normal person, to someone from the outside, even if it was Billy Hargrove. 

“Fuck off,” Billy huffed. “Answer the question.”

“I have superpowers, apparently.”

Billy narrowed his eyes. “Get out of here.”

“Yeah, don’t I wish.” Steve sat on the empty bed opposite him. It could have been a dorm room in some other universe, minus a few comforts like a closet and a window. 

Billy took in a breath and let it out very deliberately, the most measured sigh Steve had ever seen. His arm stayed tight around his middle.

“Are you okay?” Steve asked.

“Do I fucking look okay?” he snapped. “My body got ripped apart by a fucking monster, I’m stuck in this fucking— government prison with _you_, apparently, and I keep— seeing—” He gestured with his other hand, senseless motions in the air. “And what the fuck do you mean, _superpowers_?”

He didn’t think telling Billy about his powers was the best idea. Saying that he could feel everything that Billy felt, including the constant undercurrent of irritation, wouldn’t have gone over well. Probably.

But he did say, “They think I can make heads explode. Something like that.” Which wasn’t a complete lie.

“Bullshit,” Billy said. But then he squinted at him, the anger ebbing away into something close to curiosity. He must have really been through the wringer in the past couple weeks, because he said, “_Can_ you?”

Being alone in a room for days on end had been terrible. But, like. Being in the same room as someone else all the time was a fresh type of nightmare.

Either his emotion-reading powers were getting stronger, or Billy was really, unexpectedly sensitive. Steve could practically read his direct thoughts sometimes with how intensely he was _feeling_ shit. He couldn’t feel Billy’s physical pain, per se, but he could feel _how much_ pain he was in like a tightness in his middle, a phantom sensation.

The other thing that kept him awake: Billy liked to keep the lights on. All the time. Even when they both gave up on being awake and tried to go to sleep. And ever since Steve had gotten fed up, head pounding, and stomped across the room to turn them off, Billy had been ignoring him. That asshole was _pouting_.

But he hadn’t figured out how to turn his powers off and it was like they were tied together by a rope. Every time it so much as twitched, Steve felt it. He missed his solitude already.

Then one night, or day, or whenever they both decided to sleep, the rope gave a sudden yank. Steve gasped awake and looked around frantically to see Billy already sitting up in his bed, staring at him— no, past him, at the wall. He looked around, his heart in his throat, but there was nothing else in the room with them. Everything was quiet.

“What?” he said, voice strained.

Billy didn’t respond. His eyes were wide in the dark. They didn’t even flicker away from where he was staring at the wall, like he couldn’t see or hear Steve there at all. And he was holding himself really still, like a rabbit who’d caught the movement of something bigger.

There were rare times his dad talked about how his grandpa got stuck in memories of the war, what he called flashbacks, triggered by seemingly the most random shit. He’d never actually seen that happen, but he didn’t picture flashbacks like this, being blind and deaf to reality.

At the same time, the sharp, jagged fear melting into Steve froze him up too. He broke out in goosebumps. There was something about the wall behind him — walls were not walls, walls could twist and break apart and grotesque monsters could come out of them. He kept learning that lesson every year. The walls between this world and the other world were fucking paper-thin in some places.

He looked behind him one more time. Slowly let his breath out. It was hard not to match Billy’s erratic forced-quiet breathing.

“Hey,” he tried again. Billy had snapped his eyes to the door now. Steve looked where the sliver of light from the hallway crept in but his own heartbeat covered up any noise, and he couldn’t sense anyone else over the blaring fear. “No one’s out there.” In case Billy could hear it. In case it would become certain once it was spoken.

Nothing. He swallowed and forced himself to slide, stiff and terrified, off the bed and onto suddenly shaky legs. He hadn’t been this scared since he was a kid. It felt like a monster was coming. Was he really reading thoughts now, or was the feeling alone that visceral? 

Steve moved forward, crossing the space between their beds by inches. “Come on, man.” His voice was a pathetic whisper and his fucking hand was shaking when he reached out to touch Billy’s shoulder. “Wake up.”

He woke up alright. With a startled yelp he jerked away from Steve’s hand and fell right off the other side of the bed, then scrambled until his back hit the wall. It was so sudden that Steve almost screamed. His breath came in bursts, the exact same as Billy’s. 

But Billy was looking directly at him now.

“Can you see me?” he asked, sounding like a maniac to his own ears.

Billy sagged against the wall. “_Fuck_, Harrington.”

Steve nearly collapsed from the relief. “Jesus Christ, man. Scared the shit out of me. What happened?”

“Turn the light on,” was all he managed. 

Steve got up and did what he said for once, then sat back down on his own bed before his knees gave out. It didn’t do Billy any favors, either; his eyes looked worse under fluorescents. He was covered in a sheen of sweat. And he was shaking in a way Steve had hardly ever seen from anyone. Not fear anymore, but adrenaline. 

Billy swallowed. “It’s gonna sound crazy. But there’s this cold, dead place.”


	6. dragged away

They called it ‘flipping.’ Billy existed in the real world, but sometimes the real world flipped over for him and he could see into the Upside-Down. At first, he thought it had been drugged-up fever dreams. Now he was awake when it happened.

He’d lived there for days with his body under the influence of the shadow monster and never had a name for it, but he wouldn’t elaborate, and Steve had been underground while this whole thing happened. He still told Billy everything he knew while they sat murmuring to each other on the rug, their voices too low for the camera to pick up, if it was even recording sound. Neither of them wanted to give those bastards anything they weren’t forced to. 

Billy flipped _a lot_: sometimes every few hours and sometimes once a day, but always out of the blue. Before, Steve had been able to feel it from the other side of the building and had even picked up on it in his sleep, where it would shift his dreams into nightmares or his nightmares into worse nightmares. He didn’t have access to the Upside-Down, but he had access to Billy, and now Billy was right next to him.

When he flipped, he couldn’t see Steve and could almost never hear him. He said it was like he was in the same room, but that it’d been abandoned for a hundred years. That everything was poison.

Most of the time Steve was able to pull him back to the real world by touching him. On the third or fourth time, that didn’t work; Billy only flinched away from his hand and made a noise like he’d been shocked. 

So Steve just had to wait, sitting cross-legged on the floor across from Billy, sweating it out with him.

It turned out it was impossible to keep secrets here.

One time, when Billy was good and flipped, they came in. Not Rines, who Steve was used to, but a couple technicians including the doctor — scientist? Soldier? All of the above? — who was “in charge” of Billy. From what he’d seen of their interactions, the guy hated him, and Billy never passed on the chance to act like a total nightmare.

Now Billy had his face hidden in the crook of his elbow, waiting, telling himself it would stop soon, it felt like. Steve watched while they stood over him and asked him questions. They only gave it so long that it was clear they already knew he wouldn’t respond, had probably watched the tapes of Steve trying the same thing. 

Then they took him away.

It was bad enough giving him a poke when he was under. Grabbing his arms, heaving him up and dragging him toward the door resulted in a scene that sliced open the normal quiet of the room: Billy _lost his shit_. His screams sounded like he was being attacked and his terror made Steve sick. But he was strong despite all his injuries, and he was using his entire body to defend himself. It took two men on either side of him struggling to keep ahold of his arms. 

Billy couldn’t see people while he was seeing the Upside-Down, so maybe he was seeing monsters instead. Maybe he was seeing nothing, just being moved without wanting to again. Steve’s vision was starting to tunnel. He was probably hyperventilating. Before he even registered moving, he was already on his feet.

Billy’s doctor-or-whatever blocked his path. Steve couldn’t have made it across the room given the current state of his knees, anyway. Once they got Billy out the door and closed it — he could still hear the screaming down the hall, or in his head — he sank down and tried not to lose his lunch all over the floor. 

His body did not like having paralyzing fear and adrenaline dumped into it at random, and especially not on top of his endlessly rising and sinking headache. It took him a while to recover. First, he had to lift his head without getting hit by a swell of nausea. Then his heart had to slow enough that he could breathe like a normal person again. 

It felt like an hour later that the shaking stopped. However long it was, it took him as long to recover as it did for the door to open again.

Billy was walking on his own two feet this time, tensed away from their hands and looking mutinous as he came in. He snatched the door shut before either of the staff behind him could get a hand on it.

He stalked a path around the room twice. A restless, hand-wringing energy poured off of him — he wanted to hit something. Steve had rarely ever felt that urge on his own. When the agitation almost overwhelmed them both, he said, “Are you okay?”

Billy stopped short. “They want me to do it on purpose.” 

“What, flip?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Like it’s not bad enough. _Motherfuckers_,” he snapped up at the security camera, watching it like it was watching him back.

“Can you just relax?” Steve muttered. He tried to fight the antsy feeling by pulling on each of his fingers in turn.

“And do whatever they want like you do, and die here? Fuck no.” He scoffed, every inch of him that asshole from the basketball courts. When he walked back over to the camera, he said into it, “If they want me to do anything, they better figure out how to make me.”


	7. numb

His headache was sporadic and then it grew like a fire until one day — although days were relative now, so maybe it was just _at some point_ — he couldn’t get up from bed.

It was unlike any migraine or hangover he’d ever had. It didn’t make a difference whether the lights were on or off. It didn’t matter if it was totally silent or if Billy was talking, except that listening to words made him sick. The pain was constant and all-encompassing and now it was definitely starting to crush his brain.

“Hey, assholes!” Billy yelled at the door. Ever since they’d dragged him away the other day, he seemed to spend most of his time yelling. “Get that fucking doctor in here!” 

Steve turned his face out of the pillow to see Billy back away from the door and stand in front of the camera. He flipped it off.

He was still getting stronger every day. The doctors had to check on his wounds less and less. Meanwhile, Steve was falling apart. Maybe that was a new aspect of his powers. Maybe he just took everyone else’s sickness and pain until they got better, and he, what— died? His own head exploded? Was that how this was gonna end?

“I think they’re coming.” Billy was suddenly much closer to him, right by the bed. He sounded nervous when he said, “You’re bleeding, dude.”

The door opened up and he watched, blurry-eyed, as the doctor took the IV stand from beside Billy’s bed and hung something on it for him. He should have been worried about getting drugged again, but he found that he didn’t give a shit as long as his head stopped splitting open.

Maybe he passed out or something, because the next thing he knew he was floating up to consciousness. _Really_ floating.

He was lying on his back now. The IV was attached to him, stuck in his arm. And when he looked up, Rines was standing there. Asking him something. “Is the headache gone?”

Steve found himself nodding. It was gone. His brain felt totally numbed, stuffed with cotton. 

“What happened?” someone else said— Billy. He was sitting on his own bed with his legs hanging off the side, all tensed up and protective of his space. The doctor must have already left. No one else was in the room.

“We’re still working on finding out,” Rines said. Steve tried to figure out if he actually knew what was wrong and just didn’t want to let on that he was dying, but he couldn’t tell if it was a lie. Everything coming in was muddled, ungraspable. Back at Steve, sounding almost friendly, he said, “We can see how you do once this wears off.” 

Billy scoffed. “Are you kidding me?”

“What do you want from me?” He always managed to sound diplomatic. “We have to wait and see. That’s how science is.”

“What do I _want from you_?” Billy said, voice rising again. It sounded syrupy in his ears. “How about you really tell us what’s going on. Or _how about_ you let us go free.”

“Billy. If either of you left this facility, you wouldn’t last long.” Rines looked at Steve pointedly. He sounded sincere, and goddamnit, Steve hated that his powers were so muted.

It didn’t take psychic powers to pick up on Billy’s uncertainty. “Bullshit.” 

“I mean it. We want—”

“Don’t even say you want to help us,” Billy cut in. A little bristly feeling made it through the haze to Steve and he smiled despite himself. 

But attitude got him nowhere with Rines. Steve could have told him that. The man sighed and straightened the cuffs of his shirt. “Steve,” he said, turning away from Billy purposefully. Steve nodded at him automatically. “The doctor will be back in a bit to see how you’re doing.”

After he left, Billy muttered, “Fucker.” He sat simmering on his bed, eyeing Steve and the IV drip next to his bed. His shoulders were still tensed up. “Your nose was bleeding. Before.”

“Oh, yeah.” Steve sounded far away to his own ears. “It does that now.”

“Why?”

“The headache?” He was tired. Now that the pain had vanished, he thought maybe he could finally get some sleep. The light didn’t even bother him, especially not since he learned the reason Billy liked to leave it on. “Or the powers, maybe. I know a girl like that. She uses her powers, she gets a nosebleed.” 

“You were using them?” he asked.

“Oops.” Steve hadn’t told him yet. It was hard to keep track of his secrets and he couldn’t remember why he was bothering to lie to Billy, anyway. “It’s kinda, like, constant. Like hearing. But _feeling_.”

Billy looked hilariously baffled. “Feeling what?” 

“Your feelings.” He grinned, but it dropped when he saw Billy’s expression turn cagey immediately. Oops, oops, oops. “I can’t turn it off, though. It’s not my fault.”

“What, you’ve been in my head this whole time?”

“Your head’s been in _my_ head, actually.”

“And you didn’t tell me?” Billy said over him. His face had closed off, looked almost _betrayed_ like Steve had been snooping in his stuff on purpose. He drew his legs up onto his bed and looked away, over at the door, the camera — anywhere but Steve, as if not looking would do anything to hide his feelings. If only it worked that way.

That, he was pretty sure, was the last time Billy talked to him in days.


	8. humiliation

They were prisoners. Billy never forgot that, but Steve could be stupid sometimes.

It made him feel like they were more than lab rats when the technicians went so far as to include them in conversations. And when someone smiled at him, he wanted to thank them for handing him a meal. His mind just avoided the fact that someone higher up had determined this worked better on him than isolation and silence. 

He and Billy were hooked up to incomprehensible machines with little sensors attached to their scalps. Nothing new. The staff was complaining about all the hair in their way, but Billy had snarled at the notion of cutting it and they seemed to decide it wasn’t worth the trouble. Steve thought they wouldn’t have done it, anyway.

These scans were routine by now, except for the part where they had waited here until Billy flipped.

Everyone else in the room watched the machines and took notes, unaffected, while Billy’s full-body Upside-Down experience got poured down Steve’s back. It was surreal. He was shaking in his chair, as usual, from the psychically perceived chill and the fear that he hated to realize was routine, too. He was learning to disconnect himself from it, at least. Little by little.

Billy sat frozen in his chair as if he realized he couldn’t move on either plane. He toughed this one out with trembling breaths and closed eyes. They’d been waiting for him to flip for… not that long — a short enough time that Steve suspected they _could_ make him do it now, one way or another. The way both of them downed the pills given to them every day was just something he didn’t want to think about, either, because they helped his head.

His ears were ringing. He couldn’t hear what the technicians were saying and couldn’t sense their feelings over the noise.

When Billy came back, it was obvious — he heaved in a breath and his eyes, totally awake, shot around to everyone in the room. Humiliation fell over him. He’d been stuck in a chair and monitored while helplessly not present, something he hated even Steve to see after the handful of times he’d gone through it in their little room. It was clear he couldn’t stand being vulnerable like that. It was clear to Steve he was gonna do something about it seconds before he did.

While everyone was occupied with their notetaking, Billy grabbed a bunch of the wires trailing off him and ripped the machine off the table. It toppled and crashed to the ground, parts of it breaking off and shooting across the floor.

Steve barely registered the scene before everyone else in the room jumped up in a harmony of skidding chairs. The guy standing behind Billy — the guy in charge of him, the guy who hated his guts — slammed a hand down on the back of his neck. He had a gun. They knew that. They knew who was dangerous even though most of the people they encountered were unarmed. But despite the latent threat, being grabbed by the neck set Billy off on autopilot; he tried to wrestle out of the grip and was forced onto the ground, restrained by two people now with one of his arms jerked behind his back and held there. The man who’d clearly wanted to do this the longest jammed a knee into his back.

Billy sagged down right then, gasping in breaths. It was pressing into his wound, which was healed up but not _that_ healed up. The ghost of pain radiated down through Steve’s legs. 

His instinct was to stop that sensation and to get those motherfuckers off of Billy, and he tried — he shot up off the chair, faltered when he dragged a bunch of wires after him, was grabbed before he could detach himself, and went down throwing elbows while Billy’s rage mixed with his hysteria. 

His chin smacked linoleum and he bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to bleed. Somebody called down the hall for backup, like two unarmed teenagers could really gain the upper hand in this room. Billy groaned, every strained exhale trailing into a whimper. If anything, the guy on top of him drove his knee down harder.

“Stop it,” Steve growled into the floor, but it was fucking pointless. 

There was something dangerous sparking in the air, like a match finally being struck, like a tipping point. Steve felt fire running through him. He wished he _could_ make everyone’s head explode. Billy flew into a fury, barking obscenities that were almost senseless. So another person helped to hold him down, and he freaked out even more. It was an overwhelming discord.

_Stop stop stop._ That was his invocation, either at Billy or everyone else here, but it had no effect. If anything, the frenzy of the moment broke when he heard a sudden buzzing above them. Billy froze because he didn’t know what it was. Steve figured it out first: hair clippers. 

Somehow this was worse than having a gun to their heads.

“Don’t you _fucking dare_,” Billy gasped, still grappling with his injured side being crushed. Once the buzzing got closer he thrashed, trying to kick or elbow his way free, but someone else trapped him with a hand on the back of his neck again and he was caught.

Steve watched, and it was excruciating, but he watched anyway as they sheared his hair off, part by part, leaving a short and uneven buzz cut behind that looked completely wrong on him. And Billy — once he realized he couldn’t struggle away with four hands and a knee holding him down, and once the last little bit of fight escaped him — once he could only really sink into the floor, his gasping turned to sobbing.

Steve felt eviscerated. That might have been all him or it might have been all Billy. Seeing him give up was worse than anything. But this little infuriating sliver of _satisfaction_ was creeping in, _this is what you get_, and he knew for certain who it was, couldn’t angle his head enough to see the face of the guy with his knee still in Billy’s back.

It was kind of a haze, but they cut Steve’s hair off too. Distantly he thought it wasn’t really fair. He wasn’t causing trouble. But then, he had to remember, it wouldn’t have been fair even if he was. 

He hadn’t had his hair cut short since he was ten years old, and he’d hated it then. Even with the clippers swiping deafeningly close to his ear, he found himself wondering what he’d look like. He couldn’t picture himself. It was maybe stupid that his hair had been half his identity in high school, but it was definitely stupid to be upset about it now.

But. Fuck. They were halfway done before he realized he hadn’t fought them at all. Billy wasn’t looking at him or anyone, was still crying with his face pressed into the floor and his arm wrenched behind him.

They were brought back to their room — led, pushed, and dragged along, and even once they were left alone, Billy’s crying didn’t stop. It’d evolved into some kind of gasping fit that was maybe like a panic attack or just— from how Steve felt, a giant sun burning with rage, shame, desperate emotions of every kind, the feeling of falling and wanting to just hit the rocks already.

He was crying too — his body was crying without him. Their struggling breaths had started to match.

“Billy.” 

Billy let out a heaving sob. He didn’t even open his eyes.

Through a blur of tears Steve saw his face didn’t look as soft without hair framing it, if it’d ever been soft. Maybe that was one of those things you didn’t notice until it changed, like a relationship turned sour.

He took a deliberate breath in. It was too sharp, but he let it out over several seconds. “Billy,” he said again at the end of it. 

Billy cracked his eyes open, blue and red-rimmed, eyebrows scrunched together in pain or something like it, and his face crumpled again when he looked at Steve. But instead of collapsing into tears he bit down on his lip and tried to stop it.

Steve breathed in again through his teeth. A second after, Billy followed, his shoulders rising a fraction. He held it in for exactly as long as Steve did, then let it out in a rush but inhaled the next long breath on his own. Steve still felt him, crystal-fucking-clear, but somehow he’d scrambled above it. Like a vantage point. And he thought maybe if he could separate himself like that, he could send a message back.

Only it was hard to conjure a good feeling out of the air for somebody else when you felt… like he did. There wasn’t really anything he could _say_ that he would have really meant, anyway. He focused on keeping an in-and-out rhythm going and tried to just — think of being outside. He just pictured it. How it felt to have the sun on your back in late summer, which it may or may not have been already. How warm it made your skin. How it made your vision all green when you went back inside after spending hours in brightness.

Billy wasn’t calm but he could breathe now, and he could stand to look at Steve. Just for a second, it felt like they were sitting in the sun together.


End file.
